BioShock Infinite - Performance Test

BioShock Infinite, the third opus of the series and also the most anticipated game of this year was released about a month ago. It received metascores of 95/100 and was often compared to the first BioShock being even better. Here we will not discuss about the game unfortunately, we're mostly intesrested by the performance side. In this regard, BioShock Infinite makes use of a modified version of the well known optimised Unreal Engine 3 with DirectX 11 support.﻿

The game being beautiful, kickass and also bundled with AMD
graphics cards gives us three good reasons to test its performance. The testing
methodology is very simple as the game comes with six graphical presets from "Very
Low" to "Ultra" and an integrated benchmark. Furthermore, the game, drivers as
well as windows were all up to date (see "Test setup below for further
information").

- First of all we tested if the integrated benchmark was an accurate
representation of the experience you can expect when playing the game for real.
To do so we ran the benchmark with three different presets and played the game
with the same settings and compare the average FPS measured in both cases. It
resulted that the same results, 1-2 fps close, making the integrated benchmark
worth it and good.

- Second, we took screenshots of the same scene for all different presets to
show you the difference in graphics quality.

- Third, we measured the video memory usage. In this case we monitored the video memory
usage using GPU-Z under the integrated benchmark at a resolution of 1920x1080
with all the different presets. On page 2 we reported the max video memory usage
of both GeForce GTX 680 and Radeon HD 7970. We also recorded the benchmark using
Fraps and uploaded it on youtube (video on page 2).

- And finally the most important, the benchmark results! As most DirectX 11 graphics cards
were able to achieve 40 fps and up at 1920x1080 with Ultra settings and AA
enabled we only ran the benchmark with that preset (DDOF was deactivated). The original
plan was to bench the cards under different presets that suits the card the most
but in the case of BioShock Infinite it turned out to not be necessary unless
you want to see 200+ fps.
We will tomorrow add an additional page where we show what is the impact one can
expect lowering or raising graphics settings performance wise. To do so, we
will take four different cards and measure the difference in performance there
is in the benchmark results from a setting to another. Results will be shown as
an average gain/loss in percentage.